"I LOVE YOU, DADDY".......LOUIS CK STROKES HIS WOODY.........ALLEN

"I Love You, Daddy" (2017)   With or without Louis CK's instantaneous career destruction, this movie's a bizarre minefield to navigate..........

             If you take it in context of his abysmal, real life victimizing of women, the movie's a grotesque exercise, a half-assed, self serving, whining guilty plea.........with the actor-writer-director posing himself as a hapless,semi-sympathetic character stuck in a swirling cyclone of up-to-the-minute, hot button sexual issues.....

               Actually, that's the only way we could view the film.......since CK chose to fashion the entire movie like a meticulously slavish imitation of Woody Allen's "Manhattan".........(complete with crisp black-and-white photography and a loud romantic symphonic score.....you know, the one where middle-aged Woody obsessed over his teenage girlfriend, played by Mariel Hemingway)

              You see what we mean when we refer to this movie as a minefield.......of all the filmmakers CK chose to reference and pay homage to in a movie concerned with a 17 year old girl (Chloe Grace Moretz) taking up with a 69 year old celebrated director (John Malkovich) afflicted with pedophilia rumors...........he picks....Woody Allen?

                Some of the gags, which skewer artistic pomposity and the television business can unexpectedly earn some honest laughs.........but by and large, the movie's main agenda is making you squirm and cringe, daring you, as does Woody Allen, to separate the art from the artist.

                 The Hollywood community and its actors were more than willing to afford Allen that separation, for years on end..........but we have to wonder which of two factors finally pulled the plug on the Woody Allen Once-A-Year Movie Machine.........the molestation allegations or the fact that the movies really began to suck......big time.  The art no longer justified or validated the artist.

                   In the #MeToo era, Louis CK enjoyed no such generosity.......,,with his grand tribute to Woody yanked from release and now existing only in a bootleg copy for anyone who cares enough to seek it out.  (Poor Louis........in the internet age, he no longer had the option of burying the film in a vault, as Jerry Lewis did with "The Day The Clown Cried".)

                    It's maddening to examine this movie.........since it contains two brilliant performances from Moretz and Malkovich.........(Understandably, Moretz wants the movie to "just go away"......a damn shame since her work here, as CK's spoiled, troubled daughter, ranks among her best)

                   As for Louis CK........what can we say?  Throughout the film, he's begging us to identify with his overwhelmed, passive character (you wonder, how did such a wimp become a TV series mogul?)........then finishes up with a ghastly little moment in which he implies he's as much of a pervert as he suspects Malkovich of being.

                    Excruciating. Unsettling. And particularly queasy to watch in light of Louis CK recently crawling out from under the woodwork to appear in a comedy club..........his designated path to eventual redemption.

                   We may have had a glimpse here of the new battlefield...... the ferocity and determination of the #MeToo movement pitted against their defeated adversaries, who are counting on the short memories of the American populace to allow them back into public life.

                  As President Pussy-Grabber often squeaks,..........we'll see what happens.....

                  In the meantime, 1/4 of a star for "I Love You, Daddy".......and that's for Moretz, Malkovich and the music score.  The rest of it......should just go away.